How to load or manage large OpenStreetMap file in Blender for simulation
If you haven't seen it yet there is an addon to import OSM data

When it comes to working with and rendering large scenes there are some things you can do to make it easier.

Use particles or linked duplicates. When objects use the same mesh data, only one copy of vertex data needs to be held in RAM, when the polygons are drawn they get "transformed" into position based on the location of the duplicate item being drawn. If you haven't seen the post about the island flyover video, the island has 450,000 tree and rock particles which reports as over 1 trillion vertices at render and was done in 12GB of RAM.

When creating the scene, set the display of each object as bounding box, this will keep the number of vertices used to draw in the viewport low while rendering will use the detailed mesh.



Then when you want to see what a part of the scene will look like, use render border &#9096; CtrlB to define a small square in the viewport before you switch to rendered view to see the full detail in that area.

Use tricks used in 3D games. Keep the objects low poly and use materials and normal maps to make them appear more detailed. You can use some higher poly meshes in the area you want to zoom into and keep the remaining 90% of houses with low poly counts.